“Uh-huh,” Patti nodded, raising an eyebrow. “So you just ran off then, huh? Finally snapped out of it and realized how crazy it was?”

“Basically,” Jolene shrugged.

“That’s quite a story,” Patti said, leaning against her baseball bat.

“Oh, and yours isn’t?” Jolene asked. “Spending five years hunting fictional monsters because you can’t accept that a human could do something as horrible as what happened at camp? It was just a person! A lunatic, but just a human!”

Patti shook her head. Of course, she’d wondered if that wasn’t the case. When she’d run out of gas in her car, and money to put more in, she’d wondered. When she’d run away from the third straight house of a former counselor because she overheard their parents calling the police to tell them they had a ‘missing person’, she’d wondered. When she’d started having to keep to the shadows as she watched the people from her list, feeling more like a monster herself than the hero she knew she was, she’d wondered.

“There’s always two,” she said again. “He had to know there was a risk he’d be taken down… He would’ve turned someone before going in for the big feast. You.” She lifted the bat, pointing it at Jolene.

“I haven’t killed anyone,” Jolene countered. “Can you say the same?”

“Shut up,” Patti growled. Reminded herself it wasn’t killing, not when they weren’t human.

But was she wrong? Jolene’s story was pretty unbelievable, but, if you thought about it, wasn’t hers as well? Wouldn’t someone have gone public with the fact that vampires were real? In the age of Youtube and Twitter, nothing could stay secret forever.

“He wasn’t a vampire,” Jolene went on quietly. “Just a garden variety psycho… But he did turn someone.”

“Shut up!” Patti yelled, kicking Jolene in the chest, knocking her onto her back in the leaves and snow, poising the sharpened tip of her bat over the other girl’s chest.

But she couldn’t push it down. What was more unlikely, she wondered. Was it someone making up some fanciful quest to deal with what she’d seen? Was it another person drifting blandly through life before allowing herself to find comfort in the loss of control?

She shook her head, raised the bat higher, staring down into Jolene’s eyes, raising it a little too high, enough that it could allow Jolene to roll away, to escape and strike back. Patti’s hands began to sweat, just slightly.

“Do you really have what it takes?” Jolene asked, with the hint of a smile playing across her lips.

Patti’s fists tightened around the bat, raised it again, muscles tensing.

Blood splashed against the white snow, and out in the forest, one girl died.

A tongue darted across a pair of lips instinctively, licking a stray fleck of blood from them before they began to form a slow, small smile.